Opinion

To the editor:

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been a leading critic of the Bush administration for authorizing the “torture” (waterboarding) of three captured al-Qaida leaders, despite the fact that former Vice President Dick Cheney says the interrogation methods yielded valuable information from men who had not previously been forthcoming, leading the terrorists to spill the beans on planned attacks that could have killed thousands more Americans.

Big labor is pushing hard to get rid of secret-ballot elections and allow bargaining units to organize through the intimidation racket known as “card check.” Unions have argued the grossly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow thugs to shake down workers for signatures that count as votes, is needed to bring fairness to a process that currently yields predictable, unfair results.

The writer Gregg Easterbrook is a rare bird: a non-ideological thinker. Rather than parroting a common liberal or conservative perspective, Easterbrook is known to carefully examine the facts and draw conclusions from them rather than falling back on preconceived notions.

To the editor:

In show business, exaggeration and hyperbole are par for the course. Every kid who can hire a publicist is “the greatest show-stopping sensation since …” whoever.

To the editor:

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto on Monday announced voter registration charges against activist group ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Ms. Cortez Masto said the group broke state law by instituting registration quotas, which in turn encouraged fraud.

It is now all but certain that state employee pay cuts will be part of the Legislature’s 2009-11 budget solution. Majority Democrats roundly dismissed the idea when Gov. Jim Gibbons proposed salary reductions in January to make up for declining tax collections without layoffs, saying such a step symbolized the Republican’s lack of leadership. Worsening revenue projections have brought them on board.

Lawmakers at all levels have delegated a great deal of their authority to an unelected bureaucracy. After legislators in Washington, D.C., or Carson City pass the laws, it is up to an army of career functionaries in the executive branch to actually write the rules and regulations required by the statutes.